country more than young men who are
students," one said.
While Ghaith tried to devise a new
plan to get out, tra ckers were rais-
ing their prices, charging at least four
thousand dollars to smuggle a Syr-
ia n into Italy---fifteen hundred more
than Ghaith's remaining savings. He
found another part-time job, handling
auto-insurance claims, and picked up
weekend shifts at the restaurant. "Every
dollar I made was another dollar closer
to me leaving," he said.
One friend after another was flee-
ing. A law-school classmate made it
to Sweden. One of his friends who
had been detained was released from
prison; cigarette burns covered his back,
and several teeth had been yanked out
with pliers. He, too, left for Europe.
Ghaith's other imprisoned friend died
in detention. When Ghaith looked
around, he felt alone. "All my friends
were either dead or gone," he said.Time
was running out. That December, he
would graduate from law school, and
his name would be submitted to the
military.
Ghaith borrowed fifteen hundred
dollars from his uncle, stitched bills
into his shoes again, and on Novem-
ber 29, 2014, he flew to Istanbul. In a
backpack, he had four shirts, a pair of
pants, and a black woollen scarf that
his wife had knitted for him.
He took the metro to Aksaray, a
neighborhood on the European
side of the city, which was recently de-
scribed, in a Canadian Broadcasting Cor-
poration report, as Istanbul's "human-
smuggling hub." He had learned about
a hostel there by reading posts on the
page of a private Facebook group called
Asylum and Immigration Without
Smugglers. It functioned rather like
TripAdvisor: members, many of them
Syrian refugees, shared candid infor-
mation about refugee-friendly hostels,
untrustworthy smugglers, and the lat-
est sea conditions.
The impact of social media on the
Syrian refugee crisis has been profound.
In a 2012 paper, Rianne Dekker and
Godfried Engbersen, professors at Eras-
mus University, in Rotterdam, write
that social media has not only helped
in "lowering the threshold for migra-
tion," by allowing people to remain
connected with distant family mem-
bers; it has also democratized the pro-
cess, by facilitating "a form of silent re-
sistance against restrictive immigration
regimes."
The Asylum and Immigration
Without Smugglers group was cre-
ated in June, 2013, by a thirty-one-
year-old Syrian known as Abu Amar.
At the time, Abu Amar, a former
kitchen contractor, was living in Tur-
key with his wife and two children,
trying to reach Germany in order to
receive medical care for an injury: in
Syria, shrapnel from an explosion had
pierced his spinal cord, paralyzing him
below the waist. He had attempted to
reach Europe by sea, from Egypt, but
he had been arrested before setting o
and was deported to Turkey. "I didn't
have much to do, because of the in-
jury," he told me. He heard stories of
people being abused by smugglers. "My
heart was aching," he explained. "So I
started studying the history of immi-
gration, especially among Afghans and
Iraqis, looking at maps to analyze what
these smugglers were doing." He found
routes that saved time and money,
launched the Facebook group, and
began posting annotated maps.
Smugglers threatened to kill Abu
Amar, and, in an act of sabotage, nude
photographs were repeatedly posted
to the group's page, causing Facebook
to shut it down. He has since created
a new iteration of it, and for Arabic-
speaking refugees Abu Amar has be-
come an essential guide. At one point
this summer, Asylum and Immigra-
tion Without Smugglers had more
than sixty thousand members. Joel
Millman, a spokesman for the Inter-
national Organization for Migration,
told me that when Syrians arrive in
Italy or Greece "they just melt away
at the pier---they get on Facebook, and
they know where to go."
Ghaith checked into the Aksaray
hostel, where he slept on a bunk bed
in a room with seven other men. His
roommates confirmed something that
he'd read online: smugglers were now
charging about five thousand dollars.
"I didn't have that much," Ghaith said.
He considered using his money to
bring his wife to Istanbul, but decided
against it. "I really like studying, and
Turkey doesn't have good educational
opportunities," he said. He felt mired.
"You're thinking all the time, What
should I do? How should I do it?
You spend twenty-four hours a day
thinking."
On Facebook, Ghaith searched for
information about upcoming voyages.
He found a post o ering a discounted
trip on a boat bound for Italy, run by
a smuggler known as Abu Emad. It
departed soon from Mersin, a city on
Turkey's southern coast, across from
Cyprus. Ghaith travelled fourteen hours
by bus to Mersin, and, the next morn-
ing, he followed instructions from the
Facebook post and went to an insur-
ance o ce, where he deposited four
thousand dollars into an account, ac-
cessible by a four-digit code. Once he
reached Italy, he would release the code
to Abu Emad, and the payment would
be complete.
The insurance o ce was crowded
with other refugees, and Ghaith be-
friended one of them, Osama, a
twenty-three-year-old Palestinian
journalist from the Gaza Strip. They
shared a hotel room as they waited
for the boat journey to begin. Osama
told me that Ghaith was admired by
their fellow-refugees for his witty im-
personations of Abu Emad and his
associates, adding, "He could mimic
their voices perfectly."
After several days, Turkish smug-
glers herded Ghaith and the others
onto buses. Ghaith had read online
about this division of labor: Arabs like
Abu Emad acted as salesmen and bro-
kers, while toughs from Turkey or the
former Soviet republics did the actual
smuggling. "Abu Emad had the face of
a chess player," Osama told me. "He
was just the middleman."
The Turks drove the refugees to a
dockside warehouse where fishermen
stored their catch. Ghaith was stand-
ing beside a giant refrigerator, waiting
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 26, 2015
45